Good Video Editors: After You Graduate from Windows Movie Maker!

TerryBritton

Windows Movie Maker is nothing to sneer at once you get the output profile selection and setup right - the defaults are mostly horrific. There are alternatives, however.

Lightworks has a free edition (registration required, but their emails are not too offensive).

Blender is much more than a 3-D rendering and animation tool - it has a formidable video editor and compositing tools built in. The interface takes SOME getting used to (watch plenty of YouTube videos).

Avidemux is a Linux program ported to Windows and Mac.

These are all professional tools and as such take a bit of learning, but all three are free!

If you get a Linux distro like AVLinux or KXStudio using their Live DVDs burned onto a disk and can figure out how to get the audio to work with JACK (not that hard, but YouTube videos to the rescue again), you'll have plenty of other alternatives. OpenShot, Cinelerra, Avidemux, Blender, PiTiVi, the Adobe Premier-like (amazing) KdenLive, Kino and Lives are all popular with tons of support.

This guy mentions them all: http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/top5-linux-video-editing-system-software/

Please add your own favorites and any settings or compression setups that you used to make the editors work better!

Terry

MartyrA2J

This was the question I asked to Terry which he responded to with the above!
I couldn't post at the time.

Hey there! Let me start by saying how much I love Camstudio.

Mind you when I first got it. I wanted to smash my head into a wall not know ANYTHING about framerates or playbacks or codecs or pretty much anything. Its been about 2 weeks and I have become fairly adept at using it now.

Achieving framerates at around 35-60 depending on what I'm recording. Its amazing and you can see my work here gradually improve.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwWU2vt4puPBmjZu7TBH-6w

So thank you for this program. I am enjoying doing LP's and that wouldn't of been possible had it not been for your tutorials and posts and guidance. Even if my brain bled a couple of times! lol

Now my question is not as much about Camstudio but more from a content creator stand point. I use Windows Movie Maker and while that has served me extremely well and I have also learned to use that quite well. I was wondering if anybody knew a video editor that was good for someone who is near a beginner but ready to move up a bit.

I ask here cause this community seems trust worthy and intelligent and I would like to avoid any viruses and there is plenty out there. I got one downloading some other program and I had to system restore. (that sucked!)

What am I looking for in a editor, A: Be free. Not talking about trial offers but just something free in general that I can learn to use and then if I want, I will buy an advanced one. B: the ability to create a intro/outro to my videos to make it easier for viewers to move onto other content I have created.

If anybody has advice or suggestions. I would appreciate it immensely as doing my own searches has led to overwhelming amounts of programs and "trial offers" which I would prefer to avoid not to mention the amount of viruses that infest these random editors out there.

Again thank you so much to creators of Camstudio!
Martyr.

MartyrA2J

Thank you very much for the speedy response. I will take a look at those for sure!
You guys rock!
Hopefully will create a decent intro/outro soon and will reply here to show my results from said editors suggested.

my Settings btw for my LPs.

Xvid MPEG-4 Codec
Key Frames: 60
Capture frames every: 10
Playback rate: 100

I use the stereo mix trick for sound and use Audacity to record my commentary.
for the configuration I am at 1 maximum and set it too real time. This pretty much pushes the FPS to the limit but also makes the files kinda big. I have a large hard drive so this isn't an issue for me. Also the switching to 16bit resolution was a HUGE help to my videos. This is by far the biggest suggestion I could tell anyone.
I get about 30 mins before I hit the 2gig limit and then usually all is lost. Thank god my phone has a timer. lol

Again this is all for recording Let's Play not long seminars and such.

TerryBritton

Ah - that's interesting about the 16-bit color resolution trick helping you out (and why not? It is capturing FAR less information than 24 or 32 bit color!)

Below is my video on where those settings are to change to 16-bit, (but, reader, if you are in a rush, they are in the Display/Screen Resolution/Advanced Settings/Monitor tab/Color drop-down for Windows 7/8 and in the Display/Advanced tab/Advanced settings button/Monitor tab for XP).

Also watch this warning how some codecs will not work with 16-bit mode, but usually only codecs that will actually work in a certain color mode will appear in CamStudio's compressor-selector drop-down.



Windows 7 settings:



XP settings:

bmoreken

With regards to free video editors, I use Avidemux 2.5.3. It’s quite an old version, but it does just about anything you’d need in terms of conversion and frame rates, etc. It will open h264/AVI, MPEG-4/AVI and MPEG 1-2/AVI with no problem, but it has no onboard decoder for Lagarith or Cam lossless and stumbles badly on MJPEGs produced by Cam. One can output Cam-produced videos in an MP4 or MPG container as desired. There are many more recent generations of the program available, but I can’t say how well they work, as I haven’t tried them. I’ve pretty much gone back to using my old Cam settings of 5/90 and then processing the result in Avidemux at 200/30 for perfect audio sync and media player compatibility. (Note that 200 FPS is the highest this Avidemux version can deal with and that is an annoying limitation).

Ken